I always hang in a buffalo stance. I do the dive every time I dance.

After both calling and filling out a web form with Tri-met's lost and found department, I got an email back yesterday saying they had it. I went down after work (interestingly, using the same bus line on which I originally lost the wallet) and picked it up. My two dollars cash was gone, but the monthly transit pass was still there, as was my ID. Also, my Great Clips receipt is still there, and that's four bucks off my next haircut! But most importantly, I feel some more faith in my city's people.

All the little chicks with the Burt's Bees lips say
PORT-LAND ROCKS,
PORT-LAND ROCKS.


In other news, size 15 Keens seem to be the most comfy for me. They're outlandishly large on my feet, but when I throw in my preferred insoles[1] and take into account my preference for loose shoes, that's where it lands. Or seems to. That particular model I mentioned is only available up to 14, so I'm going to head back to REI tomorrow to do a retest. I hope I was just paranoid earlier. Man, I've been buying the same cheap Hi-Tec boot model for three years (five pairs!) because my feet love them, but they're not waterproof and the quality isn't reliable. I gotta find a new go-to.

And if there's a more dull topic to blog about than shoe selection, you let me know about it.

____________________
[1] I have what are called "thin feet." Though it's lower than it used to be, I do have an arch. But my feet aren't as thick top-to-bottom as an average guy's and never have been. So my MO is to throw a pair of Spenco cross-trainer insoles into whatever I'm wearing on top of whatever the manufacturer puts in there. I do recommend the brand and model of insole, even if you have to break some glue to physically rip out whatever insole your shoes have. I've been using them for over a decade. They cost less now than they did when I first started, about $18.

I've been wanting to try Keen shoes for a while. They have large toeboxes, which my messed-up feet need. They're also relatively expensive. But I think I'll splurge this time. Here's a review that kind of cemented my decision, found on Altrec.com's site, for the Brooklyn Men's Mid Boot:

William Briese - 2009-03-30

Great Boots For a War Zone!

Had wanted to buy a pair of Keen's for awhile and needed a new pair of boots while deployed in Afghanistan (issued pair not so good!). The Brooklyn's are fantastic boots, very water resistant, easy to clean up and comfortable. Do not realize they are on your feet after 14 hours and so great that I bought a second pair and sent them home for when I return from Afghanistan.

...Wow.

[Link].

I lost my wallet yesterday on the way to help a friend move. I called my bank while retracing my route and canceled my card before anyone had a chance to use it. The only other thing in that wallet I'm worried about is my Blockbuster card, and potentially having to deal with someone renting a bunch of movies and never returning them. Of course, Blockbuster can't bill my card now, so...

And hey, my library card. I'd better go down and get the old number killed while they're still open.

All in all, this is much less traumatic than I'd thought it would be. Although if I'd had my SS card in there, I would officially have no valid ID documents in my possession. I lost my birth certificate years ago, and it was the old original format that places don't accept these days anyway. So I think that once I get my replacing-stuff head of steam up, I won't let it die until I have a spankin' new birth certificate and maybe a passport.

Okay, so let's run down the list of WTF-awesome cameo roles on this show:

- Martin Sheen (cheap given the circumstances, but still)
- Jenny McCarthy (seriously, her performance included the best-acted dramatic moment on any TV show I've seen, ever. Said moment was brief, but I kept having to reality-check myself that I was watching (a) TV, and (b) a sitcom).
- And now Carol Kane.

CAROL KANE.

I've had a nontrivial crush on her for years. Even that long-distance phone service commercial she did several years back got me all excited. And she is still awesome.

I think I'm in love with Zoe Bell.

I guess I'll just get in line on that one. Really, if you like women at all and you watch Death Proof, there's no getting away from it.

She is her own stunt.

</Ted Nugent>

Two chicken quarters, buncha mushrooms, carrots, celery, parsnips, green onions, regular onion, garlic. Salt & pepper. Basil, oregano, parsley. I ran out of poultry seasoning and tried to buy some in bulk yesterday at Winco, but they were out. Had been for two weeks, according to the staff, and no clue why. I dithered in the bottled spice aisle over whether to spend over two dollars for something that would normally cost twenty cents. "Screw it," I thought, and spent eight cents on some bulk celery seed and sage. And I didn't even use all of it.

Yep, it smells pretty magical up in here.

My TV has an odd handicap that I posted about long ago. It's got an integrated VCR (now nonfunctional), and all signals get piped through it. This means Macrovision copy protection kicks in when anything DVD got sent to my TV. I solved the problem by altering my DVD player's firmware, detailed in this post. It's now Macrovision-free, region-free, everything-free.

But it looks like Netflix's streaming movies use Macrovision, too. I can still watch the movies, but the brightness bumps down, then back up at regular intervals. That's Macrovision's MO. Pretty annoying. And I don't suppose I can just up and solve this by doing a Google search and following instructions. So now the solution is to buy a different TV.

This is why God invented Craigslist. The proliferation of cheap LCD TVs combined with the digital broadcast revolution have formed a Voltron of high-quality CRT TVs flooding Craigslist at ludicrously low prices. I predict that I will soon become the owner of one of these TVs.

Either that or I'll break and shell out for a new 19" or 22" LCD set. Can't tell yet.

I'm finally on it (and Netflix!). Username arollin.

I went out and picked up Left 4 Dead.

I just reached out and grabbed a fruit fly with my hand, killing it. This is oddly empowering.

Also, this is not a metaphor for something else.

··· Chicago’s Loss: Is Passport Control to Blame?
Probably not. Brazil hadn't had the games before, so it made a great deal of sense to give it to them if they can at all handle it. But an IOC member pointing out that entering the United States can be "a rather harrowing experience" in the Q&A session following Chicago's official presentation does make the brows raise a bit. Most importantly, though, I hope that this sticks in the news for a while and that public perception is that the TSA scared away the Olympics. That might lead to less of this (and this past linkdump of mine has three more incidents that piss me off, but none so much as the JFK detention article). I know that a lot of conservatives are blaming Obama for chasing away the Olympics. I haven't heard that sentiment since he got the Nobel Peace Prize, but that might be only because said conservatives are mouthfoaming about that now.


··· Bob Hertzberg is kind of an impressive guy. After a career in politics culminating with his being the 64th Speaker of the California State Assembly (Democrat), he went into the solar technology business. His first venture was in L.A., and relied heavily on job-creation subsidies that were pulled out from under him at the last minute. The business failed. So he started a new one, based in Wales, U.K. He went outside the US to escape regulatory mazes, seeking and accepting no government subsidies there except a smallish one to help build a fence around his factory. It was an existing building, formerly owned by the Acer computer company, and he powers his production largely (entirely?) with a bigass wind turbine.

And his product? Thin-film solar cells, and products using them. They're much less efficient than silicon-wafer cells, but also much less fragile, and generate more reliable and consistent power across a much greater range of light conditions than more conventional solar cell technology. And they're far cheaper. (Fortune Small Business article, G24 Innovations company website).


··· Reeeally thinking about buying these bamboo fiber sheets from Bed, Bath & Beyond. The price—$35 for a full set—is VERY reasonable compared to Amazon.com prices on bamboo sheets. The thread count is lower than I'd normally want, but apparently the material is naturally smoother than cotton, so I don't know. I'd probably want to hit a hard BB&B location to cop a feel before I bought.


··· Your brain is defective (optical illusion).

Update:
.


··· Hilarious Overheard in New York entry. This one is also good.


··· This has probably made the rounds, but here: What stormtroopers do on their day off.


··· A longish while back I saw this post on Boingboing about some multibladed shredding scissors only available in Japan. Now they're being marketed in the US as herb chopping scissors and they got another BB post. Funny! Anyway, they're less than $10 on Amazon [link]. All I really need to shred is account numbers and maybe addresses, so it feels silly to shred a whole sheet of paper in a bigass shredder that makes an obnoxious noise just to kill three lines of text. With these scissors, I could just snip-snip and be done with it in comparative silence. I've also been on the lookout for a full-on hand-crank shredder. I haven't seen any on store shelves, but Amazon has this and also this much more popular (and apparently crappier) model. I'm not sold; the scissors look much more appealing. I do have a little electric mini-shredder that has spent five years not dying under infrequent use, but I hate the noise.

Update: I ordered the scissors.


··· Steel velcro.

...is still making noise. It's not overtight, it's properly lubricated, and three different professional bike mechanics have said that the cones and hubshells look completely fine. I get the feeling that trying to troubleshoot this issue piecemeal would be a fool's errand. I've already put in new bearings. The noises seem to happen in time with wheel rotation, indicating that it's not the cones, but rather the hubshells that are somehow messed up. There's just no economically reasonable way to replace those—when they get messed up, the cheapest option that doesn't involve me lacing spokes and truing shit is to just buy a new built wheel. They don't even really make seven-speed freehub bodies anymore, so I'll just get a new 8-speed built wheel and a spacer, slap my existing cassette on there and go. And bonus: the damaged spoke replacement and wheel-truing I need to have done on that rear anyway? OBVIATED!!!

··· Wow, if you dislike neoconservatism, or just like reading about sociology, please check out this LJ post and the two links right at the end. The post gives some details about a representative poll of 1,000 Americans, cross-referenced with other polls, that was used to determine what I'll call belief associations. I.e., people who believe a, b and c statistically often believe d, e and f. A finding:

RWA scale scores (higher == more authoritarian -- Ed.) correlated highest with attitudes against same-sex marriage, abortion, drugs, pornography, women’s equality, unconventional behavior and free speech, and with support for the Patriot Act and America’s "right" to spread democracy by military force. In contrast, the relationships with economic issues (taxation, minimum wage, the public versus private sector, free trade) proved much weaker. The data thus indicate, as do a lot of other findings, that high RWAs are "social conservatives" to a much greater extent that they are "economic conservatives."

So the Bush presidency and the people who supported him all the way suddenly make sense. And seriously, the first of the two links at the end is a fucking laff riot. Go read.

William F. Buckley is the kind of conservative we need more of in Congress--fiscally conservative, and socially libertarian-leaning. The kind of guy who'll speak up when the economics of a bill don't pencil out, and who will react against such things as warrantless wiretapping. He is considered to be the founder of modern conservatism, but was critical of the Bush administration. His attitude toward marijuana, as expressed in this 2004 essay is decidedly different from the current conservative political stance (again, libertarian-leaning). He even tried marijuana himself (Boingboing link, not the world's most reliable but generally good, and I've heard this story elsewhere many times), after sailing his yacht into international waters. He was not impressed with regard to the danger of the plant. He was at one time a reasonably profound racist, but rescinded those views in the sixties after observing the processes of the civil rights movement and after being confronted by a close colleague regarding the morality of his views (wikipedia paraphrase). In short, he was rational. We need more of that.


··· Fucking shit! Philadelphia To Close All Public Libraries October 2nd.


··· And completely by accident, here's a neat little arty bit on Benjamin Franklin. Really, Franklin is my favorite historical figure in the world, ever.


··· A Long Walk Across China. Dude did the hold-the-camera-at-arm's-length-and-photograph-yourself thing every day during a yikes-inducing multithousand kilometer walk across China, sometimes several snaps or some motion video (it looks like). THEN HE STITCHED THEM INTO A VIDEO. Omg.


··· This shirt radiates awesomeness. I'm straight and I might wear it. Of course, I live in Portland, so I could wear it and not be afraid of getting the shit kicked out of me.


··· Awesome coilgun. Self-contained with 4 AA batteries (14 shots, 90-second capacitor charge time) or wall-current plugin. I did some experimentation in railgun-building in college, but I abandoned it pretty quickly. I never really researched coilgun technology. This is pretty amazing. Dude built it in a week.


··· Awesome wedding proposal. Scroll down to #5. DO WATCH BOTH MOVIES THERE. The first is what aired on the TV, the second is the fiancee's reaction. She reacts just a little bit dramatically.


··· So that weekly poetry reading I occasionally go to? The one I frequent less and less because it starts later and later and my workday DOES NOT? Yeah, it got picked as Best Reading Series in Willamette Week's Best of Portland issue this year. "With $3 generous pours of bourbon, the scene is anything but gentle or pretentious and topics typically center on, Gaffney says, 'booze, fighting and fucking.'"

Booze and fucking, that I'll accept. Not much fighting, though. But oh, God, the fucking. I remember a few months ago there was a benefit week for a beloved regular, a 50ish guy who'd had foot surgery and been laid off while still under anesthesia. He was there, all becaned and limpy. Gifts and donations abounded and, naturally, all the ladies whipped out their sex poems. But so did one of the hosts (not Tommy Gaffney—the other guy whose name I can't remember because I'm an asshole). I forget the first few words, but after that it went, "...and you ask me if I want to sleep with anyone else. No, I don't want to sleep with anyone else, and I don't want to sleep with you. I don't want to sleep, and I don't want you to sleep." He went on to cover descriptions of the evening he envisioned. "There should be at least one piece of broken furniture and one hole in the wall," was the least graphic line. Among many, many other things, he described his jaw fusing to her pelvis and semen production voluminous enough to turn her irises white. He did this in the most creative and artful way you can imagine, really, and the delivery was almost completely deadpan. His superhot poet wife was right there, in the room, in the third row, wearing a big, shit-eating grin. The entire audience was looking between her and him and thinking OH MY FUCKING GOD! Several people went beyond that and said it out loud between fits of not-as-nervous-as-you'd-think laughter. And when he reached the crescendo of this truly raucous and intricate piece of writing, and stopped, there was a huge round of applause, and people picked themselves up off the floor, and it all died down, and then he leaned toward the mic and said, "Part Two."

THERE WERE THREE PARTS. I think we all lost a year off of our lives just sitting there retching our kidneys out laughing.

I just rode 6.5 miles with a carton of farm-fresh eggs in my bike basket and none of them broke. Let's hear it for convolute polyurethane foam, yo. I knew there was some damned upside to working in packaging.

In other news, Casa de Tamales, where I got the eggs, has pretty good tamales. Not stellar overall, but the corny outer bit tasted lovely. Their housemade refried beans are bland. The service is friendly.

I'll have limited net access for the next few days.

My other big drive died a while back, so I've been using a much smaller one for a backup drive. "Smaller" as in I had to delete my older backup to make room for a fresh one. And, of course, this time I grabbed the wrong Desktop directory from Documents and Settings. So I lost a whole bunch of photos. All my Washington DC photos, all my Seattle photos, all my photos from my Multnomah Falls bicycle outing. Crap.

I think I might start a habit wherein I physically switch my backup and main drives when I want to do a fresh install, i.e. take the main drive out and put it somewhere REALLY SAFE like the oven or bathtub while I wipe and install on the backup drive. Or maybe that's silly.

Dickies black zip-up hoodie, large-tall, for $23 down from $45? YES PLEASE. Random 40% off sale plus coupon in today's paper equals awesome.

ETA: Oh, neat. 40% off and then 15% off of the resulting figure yields a figure that is exactly 49% off of the original price.

In other news, I'm on XP instead of Win2k now! My USB 2.0 actually functions at proper speed! Bootup is quick! Je suis un instant fanboy. So what if I'm still two generations behind.

Via the_terrible, who is right—this never gets old:

You know that Irish-sounding song that they'd occasionally play on Deadliest Catch? One day a few weeks ago I had the presence of mind to scribble down some lyrics. And now I'm cleaning my desk off. Brief but nontrivial Google-fu reveals that the song is "Between" by Vienna Teng! (Amazon samples link; whole song on Youtube). Not only is she not British—she's from California—she's not even white. I love stereotype-bucking, so this makes her twice as awesome.

ETA: Fucking crap, she used to be a software engineer. 5x awesome.

Al Franken talking informally to a group of people at the Minnesota State Fair.



Via Boingboing.